Free Republic

FOR DECADES,A major piece of counter-culture history was wedged behind a bed in Merl Saunders’ San Francisco house. The crude pipe looks like something a teen may have cobbled together at summer camp, but according to art historian Steve Cabella, it’s basically a religious object. A so-called “spirit pipe,” this particular pot implement was made by LSD pioneer Augustus Owsley Stanley for Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, & it’s been MIA for decades. “I’ve bought party pipes from rock people before,” Cabella — owner of California antiquities shop The Modern i — tells Rolling Stone. “They’re just funny little things;...

San Francisco Deadheads, you might just end up having the perfect school to enroll your children in. Jerry Garcia, the frontman of the Bay Area band that rose to fame as a part of the counterculture in the 1960s, is one of multiple figures in consideration to get a school renamed after them following the San Francisco Unified School District board’s decision Tuesday to rename 44 of their schools, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

While rock 'n' roll is necessarily classified as a form of pop music, it is actually an idiom whose radical, destructive primitivism established a new type of socio-cultural disorder. It's about rejection of the status quo and celebration of the dis-imprisonment it instills. Always exploited for profit, rock's unmanageable aspects have been steadily diluted by a sinister, commercially driven course of revisionist myth-making. There is no acceptable role in the marketplace for radicals like Charlie Feathers, Poly Styrene, Lux Interior or Roky Erickson, but there's always room for the homogeneous, money-hungry, play-it-safe phonies on this list. These douchebags all have...

Investing in Jerry Garcia's Art MarketWatch By Alan Doyle It was a family homecoming night, with more than a touch of gray, at the latest Grateful Dead-inspired alchemy of music, art, hippie capitalism and community activism. With children and grandchildren in tow on an unseasonably chilly night in San Francisco, members of the Dead's extended family crowded into the Matrix, the legendary Marina District nightclub where many of them had helped define rock and roll four decades earlier. They gathered for the first exhibition of the late Jerry Garcia's early oil paintings, historically important but largely unknown. The paintings were...

SONOMA - The long, strange trip continues for Jerry Garcia's toilet. Police say the Grateful Dead leader's commode was stolen recently from a driveway along with three other toilets and a bidet. Garcia's salmon-colored toilet was the subject of a legal battle before it was finally moved to Sonoma, to await shipment to a Canadian casino. It's unclear if the toilet was swiped by a wayward Deadhead or a thief remodeling a bathroom. Police have no suspects or leads. Henry Koltys bought Garcia's Marin County home for $1.39 million in 1997 and removed the toilet and other items he planned...

Residents eye proposal for new highway project Dozens of area residents examined maps of proposed routes and discussed the implications of the proposed I-69 Trans-Texas Corridor at an open house Wednesday in Calallen. Still in its preliminary stages, the proposed highway will stretch from Mexico to Canada. In Texas, it generally will follow U.S. Highway 59 from Texarkana to Victoria. From there it will split and go to both Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley, roughly following U.S. Highways 59 and 77. The project is undergoing an environmental impact study, said Doug Booher, TXDOT environmental manager. Fred Wollmann, who lives...